Cryptography R&D engineer

The opportunity: #

This position is open exclusively for Ukrainian residents within Ukraine (preferably Kyiv or Lviv).

We are looking for a Crypto R&D engineer with Rust experience to join our team and work with us on innovation in cryptography. If you are interested in applied cryptography, modern math and application security, this may be the position for you!

We are a data security solutions company, developing software products (open-source and proprietary), as well as providing custom bespoke solutions to innovative development teams around the world. Our mission is to make strong security methodologies and approaches convenient within modern infrastructures and, as the software is eating the world, help it eat the world responsibly, without leaking customer’s data.

Our software is well-known amongst security-aware teams, recommended by OWASP, and popular for easily solving complicated security challenges. But as we reach a wide audience beyond the security circle, making our products more understandable and accessible for non-security geeks becomes a new challenge.

We work in the B2B space, with such customers as power grid operators, payment processors, legal companies, million-user customer applications. We cater to young ambitious startups and well-established enterprises, who use our software and solutions as core part of their security arsenal. Our customers are smart, but demanding.

Markets: EU, UK, USA.

You will: #

• Work as part of cryptographic research and development team.
• Analyse modern applied cryptography structures and algorithms, participate in the analysis of their security, and adapt them for our software needs.
• Participate in the code review of someone else’s cryptographic code (it’s fun!).
• Design, write, test, implement, wrap, debug code that implements certain mathematical and cryptographic constructions for secure distributed computing.
• Write code, write tests, read cryptographic papers, write specs, discuss cryptography, jump on calls, draw diagrams on the board.

We would expect you to have: #

• Experience with Rust (or good experience with C++, Scala, Haskell, whatever and readiness to learn Rust).
• Good understanding of cryptography basics (hash functions, signature, symmetric encryption, asymmetric encryption, ECC, DH).
• Good understanding of math and computer science – you will need to work with modern math, and modern algorithms often, and your colleagues will use academic language with you.

As a plus you’d have: #

• Good knowledge of applied cryptography, and / or formal education in this area and knowledge of the underlying mathematics.
• A general overview of programming languages will be a big plus: C, Go or Scala would be nice.
• An overall understanding of what information security is, how real-world risks and threats affect the choice of security controls and cryptographic structures, where cryptography needs to be supported by other security controls, what zero trust architecture is, and why AES-CBC is a questionable choice.
• An understanding how modern blockchains work with transaction privacy, what primitives are used, multi-signature protocols, consensus.
• The general understanding of zero knowledge proof protocols (interactive & non-interactive). We work with ZKP a lot, so it will be important to have a general understanding or willingness to learn.
• General understanding of modern applied cryptography: HPKE, key wrapping, CT on Merkle trees, the problem of searching in encrypted data.

Hiring process: #

• Resume review – up to 5 business days
• Introductory meeting
• Test task – estimated time 1-3 hours
• Technical interview
• Offer discussion

Please note that you can be a perfect fit even if not everything we’ve outlined above applies to you. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask – everyone is unique.

We offer: #

Unique area of expertise: #

• Difficult and interesting work at the forefront of cryptography: zero knowledge proofs, private information retrieval, smpc and other fascinating problems in the applied field. We work with a full cycle of modern cryptographic problems: from scientific papers and mathematics, test implementation and PoC, to production-ready implementation of cryptographic controls in software.
• Public track record in the Open Source part of the products and the opportunity to participate in research projects with companies that are moving different parts of applied cryptography in finance, distributed computing and privacy-enabling technologies forward.
• Work at the intersection of technologies: cryptography, software engineering, information security. You won’t be bored :)
• A sense of meaning and responsibility for those who have been tamed - your code will work for many years in large and small systems, from data protection in power plant management to advanced cryptocurrencies.

Environment: #

• Friendly and experienced team: smart people to learn from, great people to build with. Each of us is unique, we value and support each other.
• An atmosphere that motivates you to grow and get smarter every month, a healthy ratio of routine / experimentation.
• Trust: schedule, reporting, bureaucracy is kept at reasonable minimum. We hire smart people and trust them to do the right thing. When things go wrong, we help rather than punish.
• Shared decision making.
• Friendly to humans: not just a formal vacation and sick leave quota. Feel like your mental or physical wellbeing needs care? Take some time off. Feel like working a few days from home? Sure. As long as you’re in line, we are here to support you when you’re not.

Growth: #

• Team that facilitates internal learning and growth all the time.
• Interesting technologies to work with — sometimes, even unique ones (we design applied cryptography schemes and techniques and novel ways to use them).
• Ability to grow into one of the fastest growing industry sectors (computer security) with a team of experienced professionals.
• Management attention to help you improve upon your personal goals (through regular 1:1s and mentoring).

Benefits: #

• Competitive compensation with flexible bonus scheme.
• Sick leaves, 21 vacation days a year, extra days off — according to agreements and laws.
• Conferences, books, courses — we encourage learning and sharing with the community. Our team members share a lot in talks, workshops and blog posts.

Not sure but considering? Talk to us. #

If you see yourself fit but a few things are off — don’t hesitate to talk anyway. It might be that your unique combination of skills and knowledge would be perfectly fitting for our environment, but we both just don’t know it yet.